With some of the best martial arts fighting in years, "Grandmaster" connects as a biography of Bruce Lee's trainer, Ip Man.

Review: 'The Grandmaster'

When it comes to inspiring biopics, the story of Ip Man is about as big as Lincoln.

Since 2008, Ip Man, the famed martial arts trainer of Bruce Lee, has been the subject of no fewer than four films.

The Grandmaster (*** out of four, rated PG-13, opens in limited release Friday) marks the fifth and most ambitious yet, an historical opus that is equal parts ballet and biography, though the second component pales in comparison with the first.

Directed and co-written by estimable Chinese director Kar Wai Wong (Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love), Grandmaster has some of the most impressive martial arts scenes since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Like that Ang Lee Oscar winner, Grandmaster takes martial arts and turns it into a spectacular dance, one the actors trained years to learn. And it shows: The first hour of the film is as gorgeous as Tiger, with the plus of being a real story.

The film tracks Ip Man through World War II and his honing of Wing Chun kung fu, which he would make popular throughout the world. Set during the Japanese occupation, Grandmaster chronicles China's growing rift between martial arts masters, particularly Ip Man's deadly, minimalist "Southern" style and the flashier "Northern" style of fighting.

Tony Leung plays the title role, and he's spot-on. A favorite of Kar Wai Wong (he starred in Love), Leung has the stillness and intensity to give Ip Man the quiet confidence of a guy who could kick Bruce Lee's butt.

But the discovery of the film is the stunning Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha, Crouching Tiger). As Gong Er, the daughter of a rival grandmaster from the North, she is utterly convincing as a warrior who understands the philosophical principles of the martial arts, as well as the practical ones that break your nose.

There are scenes of gorgeous brutality that would make Quentin Tarantino salivate, and at its heart, Grandmaster is an art film. A slow-motion fight in an ornate brothel is cinematic poetry.

Unfortunately, Grandmaster can take the stiff cadence of an art film, too. Characters speak elliptically about the art of fighting, and the film has been cut drastically from its original four hours, giving the final hour a choppy, hurried feel. And there are dramatic elements of the real man's life, including the death of two daughters, that go all but ignored in the film.

And, like Lincoln, Ip Man has become lionized, if not deified, through the years. Grandmaster is no exception: In some scenes, it looks like Ip Man is literally walking on water.

But that will matter little to fans of Ip Man and the art he practiced. Stylish and well-acted, Grandmaster is a martial-arts film that has found that tricky balance of martial and art, and it connects more often than it misses.

Famous today for training kung fu star Bruce Lee, Ip Man has been the subject of several recent movies from Hong Kong. The Grandmaster arrives with backing from Martin Scorsese and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as a full publicity push from The Weinstein Company. Their combined efforts will help raise the profile but not the box office for this moody outing from director Wong Kar Wai.

The first new feature from Wong since My Blueberry Nights in 2007, The Grandmaster is for the most part a sober, straightforward biography of Ip Man, punctuated by a handful of impressively staged martial-arts battles. The story hits on many of the same points as other Ip Man movies. Ip Man, played here by Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, popularizes a form of martial arts known as wing chun in his home province of Foshan. During the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Communist takeover of China, Ip Man loses his fortune and most of his family, and is forced into exile in Hong Kong. To survive, he forms a martial-arts school, gradually attracting talented students like Bruce Lee.

Shot by Philippe Le Sourd, and edited in part by co-production designer William Chang Suk Ping, both longtime collaborators with Wong, The Grandmaster has a lush but somber look, especially during its early sequences in Foshan. Surprisingly for Wong, the story is direct and easy to follow, with few of the elisions and flashbacks found in his other films.

Wong finds the key to Ip Man's life in his relationship with Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), the daughter of a martial-arts master from the bagua school. They meet to defend their separate styles of martial arts, and their rivalry intensifies after an inconclusive battle in a local brothel. Events keep them apart, but an emotional connection remains over the years.

Leung, who had no serious martial-arts background, trained for years with one of Ip Man's students for his role. Similarly, Zhang, who has a background in dance, studied for months for her part. Their fights were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, perhaps best known in this country for his work on the Matrix series.

The big martial-arts set-pieces, including an opening fight at night in the rain and one on a wintry train station platform, are more impressive than involving, perhaps because the kung fu looks so careful, even studious. The rest of The Grandmaster is a mixed bag: a lot of suffering through the years, with Leung in a reverent, sacrificial mode; a little martial-arts philosophy; and some grandly romantic gestures that signify the passing of an era.

The problem is, The Grandmaster is never much fun, either as action or romance. Leung's interpretation of Ip Man is well-thought-out and credible, but lacks Donnie Yen's athleticism and Anthony Wong's stoic calm—two other actors who have portrayed Ip Man. The Grandmaster works best if you've never seen a kung fu movie before. If you have, Wong Kar Wai's film may strike you as a beautiful and expensive missed opportunity.

In “The Grandmaster,” kung-fu warriors fight as the rain falls in torrents. It’s like a forties noir, but every raindrop in this movie appears to shine, by some digital-spiritual miracle, in iridescent glory. The writer-director Wong Kar-wai, in the past a maker of romantic-erotic drama (“Happy Together,” “In the Mood for Love”), has turned back to martial-arts movies, after reworking an early effort (“Ashes of Time”) that didn’t quite satisfy him. He has created a gorgeous, entirely aestheticized spectacle. The men fight at night, in chic black suits, crashing into doors and windows; the black-on-black color design, with its sparkle of water and broken glass, is a glamorous delight.

The movie begins in 1936, when the Japanese have moved into Manchuria, and China is on the edge of a murderous occupation. It is a time of reckoning—and of reconciliation, too. The severe martial-arts grand master of the north (Qingxiang Wang), his city occupied, arrives in Foshan, the southern center of kung fu, where he announces his retirement and allows his daughter Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) to represent the north in a challenge match. Her opponent is the great fighter of the south—Ip Man (Tony Leung), an exponent of the Wing Chun style of fighting. “The Grandmaster” presents a series of ceremonious confrontations (all choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the grand master of movie fighting): the handsome, impervious Leung and the exquisite Zhang face each other silently, and rotate their hands into position—the solemn preliminaries are as momentous as the combat itself. As the two move into battle, slashing and spinning, often in closeup, the uninitiated may not be able to see much difference in method (Gong Er is a mistress of something called Bagua-style 64 Hands). The fight is a stunning whirl nonetheless; both the cinematography (by Philippe Le Sourd) and the editing (by Wong himself) have an indelible high excitement and precision. . . .

I stalled on seeing Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster because the U.S. release is 22 minutes shorter than the 130-minute version released in China. Wong reportedly doesn't share my concerns, claiming that he rose to the challenge of refashioning his film for (my words) attention-deficit America. So be it. What's on screen in The Grandmaster is off-puttingly disjointed, but it's also dazzling in its startling action and ravishing romance. Who'd expect less from the Hong Kong visionary who ranked No. 3 on Sight & Sound's list of the Top 10 directors of the modern era. On the basis of Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, Happy Together and 2000's transcendent In the Mood for Love, you'll get no argument from me. Wong, 57, doesn't make movies that evaporate as you watch them. He crafts movies you live and breathe in until they're absorbed into your system. In short, his movies are the stuff that dreams are made of. The Grandmaster is no exception. At first, you might mistake the film for a biopic with the great Tony Leung cast as Ip Man (1893-1972), the martial-arts virtuoso who taught Bruce Lee. But as we watch Ip Man interact with other kung fu fighters in scenes of clashing styles and rigid methodology, we see that Wong is capturing a long view of Chinese history that extends to the world outside. With the invaluable help of fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping and the superb cinematographer Phillippe Le Sourd, Wong turns these acts of violence into a brutal ballet. Asked to show what he's got for legendary master Gong Baosen (Wang Qingxiang), Ip Man achieves a strangely peaceful victory that sparks a rivalry with the old man's daughter Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), who appears to take flight as she takes him on. Zhang, so memorable in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is truly poetry in motion. Her scenes with Leung, a mesmerizing screen presence even (or especially) when silent and standing completely still, simmer with erotic tension. As ever with Wong, the longing is all. Has any filmmaker ever made melancholy this seductive? You leave this deeply flawed, deeply beautiful film with no doubt that you've seen an indisputable cinematic grandmaster in action.

The Chinese director Wong Kar-wai is known for sad, lyrical movies in which people always seem to be missing each other. In 1994's "Chungking Express," a snack-bar attendant breaks into the apartment of a heartbroken cop — one of her customers — to try and cheer him up by redecorating, only to leave town when he finally asks her for a date. In 2000, he made "In the Mood For Love," a story set in 1960s Hong Kong about the almost-relationship between a man and a woman whose spouses are carrying on an affair. They're confined by the manners of the society they live in, but they also hide behind them — it's good manners that spare them the difficult task of telling each other how they really feel. Instead they yearn silently, accompanied by mournful violins or the aria from an old Chinese opera, waiting with downcast eyes as the potential of the present moment passes them by. "To say there are no regrets in life is to fool yourself," a woman named Gong Er says near the end of "The Grandmaster" to a man she has harbored feelings toward for over a decade. "Imagine how boring life would be without regret." Soon they are walking side-by-side down an empty street at a comfortable distance from each other, where they part into the dark.

"The Grandmaster" is at its core an unmistakably Wong-ian film: Languid, sensual, rife with solemn proclamations that begin with words like "it is said" or "my father once said." But it's also a kung-fu movie, and Wong's first foray into action since 1994's "Ashes of Time." Based on the life of Ip Man (Wong mainstay Tony Leung), a kung-fu master famous in part for teaching Bruce Lee, the plot weaves the personal stories of both Ip and his almost-love Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) into the larger narrative of China's occupation by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War and subsequent closing of Hong Kong. Wong's storytelling is loose and elliptical: At first we follow Ip's ascendance to grandmaster; later there's a long digression about Gong Er that throws us back into the past. Often, transitions are signaled with the hand-holding device of title cards, which is a little clumsy, but also a reminder that this is a movie less concerned with the sequential, and-then and-then and-then quality of storytelling than with creating a rich and melancholy atmosphere in which the events of the plot don't connect, but float.

Choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, best known for both "The Matrix" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," even the movie's fight sequences feel romantic, lingering not only on the blows but the foreplay that precedes them. This is especially important when Ip faces off against Gong Er: The fight exists as a proxy for a physical intimacy they never share. Wong leans hard on choppy slow-motion shots that have an almost soap operatic quality — somehow both chintzy and moving at the same time. And as with "In the Mood For Love," long portions of the movie take place in or around the rain, which almost glitters in the cool blue streetlight.

This is a movie that tries to do a lot. Sometimes too much. At a little over an hour and a half, it feels short, and somehow I wasn't surprised to learn that the edit I was watching, released by The Weinstein Co., was 22 minutes shorter than the domestic Chinese cut. Its most beautiful scenes feel like tiny islands isolated by what came before or after them. This doesn't make them more or less beautiful, only a little lost on a movie that isn't sure what to do with them. And as the movie goes on, it seems less and less concerned with the kung-fu conceit of Ip Man's life than with the scenes between him and Gong Er. These are, as you'd expect, subtle: Tony Leung rarely rises above a slight curl of his mouth; Ziyi — known on both sides of the world for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and her lead in "Memoirs of a Geisha" — delivers entire soliloquies just by contracting her pupils. Despite the movie's elaborate kung fu, in the end, Wong can't stop himself from telling the story he's always wanted to tell: about two people longingly wandering past each other, into the rest of their lives.

Massive movie star Tony Leung—aka Tony Leung Chiu-Wai—could be the Marcello Mastroianni of modern Asian cinema. As the late Italian actor was for Federico Fellini, the heavy-browed, open-faced Leung is a reliable alter ego for master director Wong Kar-Wai. He stars in their latest joint effort, The Grandmaster, a loose but grandly art-directed biography of Yip Man, a kung-fu giant responsible for teaching Bruce Lee and other martial-arts greats.

The film, which opens here Friday (August 30), is Leung’s seventh collaboration with Wong—not counting the latter’s direction of Leung’s wedding to Hong Kong star Carina Lau, at a lavish ceremony in Bhutan. (Lau has also acted for Wong, alongside her husband, in such films as Days of Being Wild and the mysterious 2046.)

“My relationship with Wong Kar-Wai is very strange,” admits Leung, in a phone call from Los Angeles. “We have known each other for 20 years, but we seldom hang out. We seldom talk on set, either. I don’t know why, but we just connect. When he shows me a book he wants to turn into a movie, I already know his feelings about it. I can picture the colour, the movement, the stillness he wants. We rarely talk, and yet I feel I know him very well, in some ways. He’s more than just a friend; he’s a kind of soul mate.”

A native Cantonese speaker relatively fluent in Mandarin, English, and Spanish, the HK–born star began acting at age 20. Along the way, he has played cops, crooks, blind swordsmen, and smouldering lovers. He’s done plenty of movies and lots of Hong Kong TV alongside charismatic Maggie Cheung—someone he calls “another alter ego”. And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Zhang Ziyi is his romantic foil in the new film, which mostly takes place in 1930s China, with some flashes to Hong Kong after the war.

His work for Wong, opposite Cheung, in the sexy, super-stylish In the Mood for Love won him the top acting prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. Leung says his own screen appeal is something he can never fully grasp.

“It is not something I purposely design. Through learning each role and crafting the character—and here, with all the kung-fu practice—these things just grow spontaneously. It’s just something inside me, and I don’t know how or even why I express that.”

That enigmatic quality is something Wong draws on, judging from the actor’s analysis.

“I think this is why he explains so little at the beginning of each movie. I always believe that Kar-Wai has a complete script: he just doesn’t show it to us. He wants us to experience and explore the character. He gives you a lot of space, and you know every time will be a very long journey. You just live in the character, and that’s very different from other directors.”

Leung has starred in many more titles, among them Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, John Woo’s Hard Boiled, and his breakthrough, A City of Sadness, from Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien. (While anchoring the popular Infernal Affairs series, Leung even sang the theme song to one of the films.) Every auteur has his own style, and a unique way of relating to actors.

“Ang Lee is very precise. He will show you everything, and will let you know whatever he is thinking about the whole project. There are a lot of rehearsals before shooting, and you already reach a certain standard; then he will ask for more. Kar-Wai just asks for a feeling, and a feeling can be hard to catch. John Woo is a very nice and kind person; he gives almost no direction at all, trusting me to come up with the character. But when I think of him, I think of explosions!”

Given all this hands-on experience with such varied masters, doesn’t Leung want to be his own alter ego and jump behind the camera himself?

“No,” he says, after a thoughtful chuckle. “After working with all these great directors, I know I can’t do anything better than them. I’m much better off as an actor!”

As a 19-year-old film student, when I learned the definition of the word auteur, I was so excited I had to paint it on my stomach, Riot Grrl style, and make a movie about it. Youthful blasphemy aside, I’ve always been drawn to directors whose vision is so strong as to create that distinctive mood which would potentially define them as an auteur. Amidst all the terrible, formulaic crap that comes out, you have to appreciate someone, wholly successful or not, who is actually attempting something. It’s natural that being inventive might result in flawed movies. The risks of making genuinely creative work, with a boldness and experimentation that eschews mainstream concerns, are the sometimes shaky results. But those are the movies I want to watch. Demonstrating both the benefits and the downfall of being an auteur, Wong Kar Wai‘s swirling, vivid films are full of the mistakes, incongruities and strangeness of a visionary.

Fallen Angels (1996) was the first Wong Kar Wai movie I saw and it will be forever seared in my brain. It’s profoundly gorgeous, but the style is also the substance and that’s why it’s so phenomenal. It isn’t just gorgeous; it’s romantic and melancholy, rich with psychological exploration. It’s both cool and sincere simultaneously, a combination that is Wong Kar Wai’s signature strength. He’s clearly still concerned with style; in the closing credits to his newest, The Grandmaster, Tony Leung (a stoically bad-ass Wong Kar Wai regular) looks right at the camera and asks, “What’s your style?” It’s a wonderful moment, playful and serious, a non-rhetorical question, meant to be considered and answered. This isn’t about the surface of style, but the soul of it. In this semi-biopic tale, Leung plays Ip Man, a kung-fu master and Bruce Lee’s teacher, following his life and never-quite-romance with a fictional woman.

Watching Fallen Angels was the first time I really fell in love with cinematography. I became riveted by the iconic Christopher Doyle, who shot most of Wong Kar Wai’s movies, beginning with Days of Being Wild (1990) and ending with 2046 (2004). In some ways, my love of Wong Kar Wai movies is my love of Christopher Doyle cinematography. He also shot Last Life in the Universe, a brutal, surrealistic reverie directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang and created the memorable palette of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. More than once when I’ve watched a notably well-shot film, it ends up being Christopher Doyle behind the camera. He is belligerently charming, calling Life of Pi, “a fu***** insult to cinematography” (Amen) and ranting about the authentic color of moonlight (it’s not blue). Unfortunately if you type Wong Kar Wai and Christopher Doyle into Google, one of the top suggestions is “falling out,” so he’s not the cinematographer for The Grandmaster. I was curious, but nervous, to see a Wong Kar Wai movie without Christopher Doyle’s singular touch.

Wong Kar Wai loves clocks, counters, rain, smoking cigarettes, leaning, stairways, stoicism, loneliness, slow motion, nostalgia and unconsummated everything. The Grandmaster has some of those things (the rain is awesome), but not others. Overall it gets a C+ and the plus is because I was looking for his tell-tale flourishes (they’re there) and forgiving him when other things fell short. A.A. Dowd aptly suggests that the confines of the biopic bogged down a director who thrives within fictional worlds. The need of The Grandmaster to explain everything was tiresome, as if endless voice-overs and chunks of text were necessary for us to follow the story. It was also cut from 130 to 108 minutes and by all accounts the longer version is superior. The confines of chronology and history make the story move inexpertly and incompletely through time.

Still there are moments to love in The Grandmaster, moments where Wong Kar Wai pauses and luxuriates as he should. One fight sequence has Zhang Ziyi flipping up in the air over Tony Leung, their faces centimeters apart, the flip slowed down. It’s a classic moment of Wong Kar Wai’s particular brand of sexiness. In Leung’s voiceover, he says of his initial meeting with her, “All encounters are reunions…” That too is classic Wong Kar Wai, the lonely man narrating a wistful truth to us from off-screen. This particularly beautiful line is nearly a thesis statement for all of his movies, a whispered burst of zen interruption, reminding us of what’s at stake. It kept ringing around in my head for days afterward.

Most of Wong Kar Wai’s movies spend their time illustrating the smokey, shadowy nuance of how we encounter one another, but The Grandmaster doesn’t spend enough time there. I immediately re-watched Days of Being Wild when I got home from watching The Grandmaster. The main character, a sociopathic playboy insists a girl (behind a counter, of course) stand with him for one minute and then proclaims them “one minute friends,” a status that is fact and can never be taken back. Wong Kar Wai has a gift for capturing the sensation of the present moment’s inherent transience. In Chungking Express (1994) the voiceover says, “At our closest point, we were just 0.01cm apart from each other.” At his best, Wong Kar Wai is concerned with examining these smallest of spaces between us. That 0.01 cm is evoked during In The Mood For Love (2000) when Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung pass each other on the staircase in a moment so restrained and sexy it’s nearly too much to handle. The aforementioned flip in The Grandmaster is also about that 0.01 centimeters. The immersion in those moments is why Wong Kar Wai’s movies are breathtaking.

Wong Kar Wai’s first and only English-language film, My Blueberry Nights (2007), was a flop. I hated it along with everyone else I ever spoke to or whose review I read. It was Wong Kar Wai trying to be Wong Kar Wai and it was sad and weird to watch. The Grandmaster is not like that. It’s a smart, careful, beautiful movie in a lot of ways. Some of the fights are spectacular, Ip Man is a fascinating person and I could watch Tony Leung brood for 108 minutes or 130 minutes or however long he felt like it. But one gets the impression that Wong Kar Wai is struggling; rehashing his old tricks isn’t quite enough, but neither is leaving them behind. How can his themes, images and concerns evolve with him? Christopher Doyle had some mean things to say about how long it took to make 2046 and called it an “unnecessary” movie. So, what would a necessary Wong Kar Wai movie look like? While I wouldn’t nominate The Grandmaster as my answer to that question, I’m still glad it exists and am grateful to have seen it in a theatre where all the gold light, speeding trains and slow motion rain drops were lushly delivered on the big screen.

There is something much better, much more vital and true seeming about Days of Being Wild, as compared to The Grandmaster. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are two of my all-time favorite movies. And yet, I have to believe in the audience allowing an artist to experiment, to struggle as they move forward, to not always just get better and better, but to falter in their attempts. If someone is truly being an artist, as Wong Kar Wai is, then that trajectory seems a more honest one in some ways. He can’t keep trying to make his ’90s movies, nor should he. His concerns are epic, slow motion, aching, beautiful, heart-breaking, life and death concerns. I will gladly watch anything he creates in his attempts to unravel all that. And here’s hoping maybe he and Christopher Doyle make up.

**Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love, Happy Together, Fallen Angels and As Tears Go By are all currently available on Netflix Instant. Watch them.

Golden Horse Film Festival announced today (1st Oct) the nominees for the 50th Golden Horse Film Awards. This year the Festival received 265 submissions in total including 122 features, 101 short films, 40 documentaries, 2 animation features.

Amongst the nominated films, WONG Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster leads with 11 nominations including Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Leading Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Art Director, Best Makeup & Costume Design, Best Action Choreography, Best Film Editing and Best Sound Effects.

The other Best Feature Film nomination includes JIA Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin and Anthony CHEN’s Ilo Ilo, both received six nominations, joined by TSAI Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs and Johnny TO’s Drug War.

Best Leading Actor category includes Tony LEUNG Chiu-Wai from The Grandmaster, Tony Leung Ka-Fai from Cold War, Nick CHEUNG from Unbeatable, LEE Kang-Sheng from Stray Dogs and Jimmy WANG from Soul. Best Leading Actress includes SHU Qi from Journey to the West, ZHANG Ziyi from The Grandmaster, GWEI Lun-Mei from Christmas Rose and Cherry NGAN from The Way We Dance. These nominees, along with previous award winners, will surely shine the red carpet with splendid stardom.

The judging process is divided into three stages. At the first stage, all the films were viewed by eight judges who are either film critics, film academics or directors from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China before going through to the next stage. At the second stage, the jury was composed of eleven renowned film-makers and industry representatives. They spent almost a month watching all the films, and finally produced the list of nominations after an eight-hour meeting in which they debated and voted. The winners will be decided by the second-stage judges together with new jury panel at the final stage. The members of this new jury include Ang LEE, TSAI Kang-Yung, LI Bingbing (who won Best Actress at the 46th Golden Horse Awards), PU Ruo-Mu (five-time winner of Golden Horse Best Art Direction/Best Makeup & Costume Design) and CHANG Chia-Lu (winner of the Golden Horse Best Adapted Screenplay in 2005).

All nominated films will be screened during Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival which opens on 8th November. The 50th Golden Horse Award Ceremony will be held in Dr Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall on 23rd November and broadcast live exclusively on TTV (Taiwan Television).

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